Street scene outside the window of this 7-11: four street boys sleeping on the sidewalk. Very dirty and dishevelled. Two little boys and one much larger boy. One little boy has no clothes except for an over-sized T-shirt. The T-shirt has hiked up over his body, so he is pretty much naked lying there on the street. His little butt cheeks are exposed to the world, and most of the people that walk past them turn and take a look.

The larger boy gets up, and he sneaks around and crouches down. First, he reaches over to the one kid wearing shorts and sticks his fingers into his pockets. He’s clearly looking for money that he can take. He doesn’t find any money. Then he draws back his two fists and drives them as hard as he can into the naked butt of the youngest and smallest boy. Then he runs away and hides behind a pillar. The young boy is very frightened and wonders what happens. He sits up and looks around. The big kid thinks it is a big joke. When the little boy lies back down and goes back to sleep, the big kid comes back and grabs the feet of the second little boy. This boy is sleeping, too. The big kid grabs his feet and then suddenly drags him on his back for fifteen feet across the dirty sidewalk. The little kid is in shock, of course, and is angry. So the big kid keeps dragging him around. It’s a disgusting spectacle.

It’s none of my business, of course, but I can’t help myself. I knock on the window hard to get the big kid’s attention and I give him a mean look and point at him and make it clear that I think he’s a jerk and an idiot and he should leave those boys alone. It’s such a weird scene, because the three boys are clearly a team of sorts. The big kid actually tries to tell me this. He points at the little boys and at himself and mouths the word “friends.” And the little boys, despite their initial anger, seem fine with this treatment. I guess it’s normal for them, and there’s nothing they can do about it anyway. In any event, they’re still half asleep. And it’s probably normal for boys all over the world – these kinds of nasty tricks and bigger boys picking on smaller ones. It’s just never been my thing. I’ve never found it to be funny. The story ends with two twists. The first is that once the two little boys have noticed that I’ve become involved in their situation, they just come over to the window and ask me for money. That makes me grimace inwardly. After all, they have a point. If I’m so concerned for their welfare, then why don’t I do something useful like give them money for breakfast?

Once the dust from all this has settled, the two young boys lie back down on the sidewalk and go back to sleep – their legs and arms entwined around each other. The big boy lies down beside them and closes his eyes, too. Never a dull moment over a cup of coffee. People are so hard to like. Sometimes I wish they’d make it easier.

It’s amazing that these boys can sleep so easily. I guess you can get used to anything – including sleeping on a noisy sidewalk. I see young boys like this sleeping all over Cebu. I don’t know what their nights are like. Perhaps they are up all night stealing and causing trouble. In any event, they seem to sleep all the time. They sleep all day long. And I can understand it. There isn’t much for them to do when awake. Why not escape into sleep if you can? Without getting all bleeding heart liberal, I do wonder what will become of these boys – particularly the smallest and youngest of them. It’s kind of a question of human nature. What is his brain like? How will it develop without any kind of educational input? He’s clearly never going to go to any kind of school – unless some NGO snatches him up. What would the world look like as processed by his brain? What do I look like to him? And in twenty years, what will he be like as a person? Will he be able to read and write? Do basic math? If so, how will he attain those skills? It’s interesting that these boys – completely alone in life – instinctively band together and sleep in a group. And I don’t mean that they sleep near each other. They sleep in big piles – with their legs and arms around each other. I thought about this while I was at the zoo. There was a large cage filled with snakes – big snakes. Most of them were in the ten- to fifteen-foot range. And these snakes were sleeping in a big pile, all wrapped up like a giant knot – piled on top of and around each other. I’m generally amazed when I see stuff like that. It’s then weird to see these piles of young boys doing exactly the same thing. I’ve always been the exact opposite. I try to get as far away from other people as possible – especially when sleeping. I’ll sleep in any kind of uncomfortable place as long as it is private. Given a choice between sleeping in a large featherbed with some other person or on a matt on the cold floor. I’ll go for the floor. And it’s not just a preference. In that featherbed, I just won’t be able to fall asleep. I’ll just lie there all night wide awake.

Anyway, the drama is over. The little boys are sound asleep again. I also wonder sometimes what I would be like if I were in their shoes – if I, with my brain, grew up a beggar on the streets. What kind of a person would I be? A touchy-feely writer could come up with all kinds of scenarios where a young boy can make his way in the world and slowly make something of himself. But is that realistic? I don’t think I have any illusions about myself. I don’t think I’d have done well as a street beggar. I don’t have a particularly strong lust for life. I’d likely do just what these boys are doing – escape into sleep as much as possible.

2:00 p.m.

Back in my hotel room after a tough little day trip. I think I mentioned before that there is a viewpoint on the mountains overlooking Cebu called Top. Well, this morning, I hopped on my bike to ride up there. I wasn’t sure if that was wise or not since it was sure to be a difficult climb, and I didn’t want to hurt my knees.

I made it out of the congested city without too much trouble. I recall screaming at a horn-honking driver only twice. I think trucks, cars, and motorycles in Asia should have their horns outfitted with a 1-peso corn slot – they can only blow their horn once after inserting one peso. As it is, since it’s free, they lay on that horn like it is a law to do so. Even if someone comes up behind me and wants to honk their horn to warn me, they only need to do it once – a short little toot will be sufficient. I don’t even need that since I’m very aware of traffic. I can hear their engine, and I’m constantly monitoring my rear view mirror. But these idiots honk, and honk, and honk, and honk, and honk till I can’t help but scream at them.

Traffic died down quite a bit once I hit the mountains. That isn’t to say that things were easy. The mountain roads here are extremely steep – far steeper than anywhere I’ve ever been – and it takes all my strength to go up them. To do it at any speed, I’d have to get up off the seat, but my bike doesn’t really let me do that. I’ve often thought a road bike geometry would be better, because then you can get up off the seat and still pedal. With these short mountain bikes, you can’t do that. You can’t use the weight of your body to pedal. You have to rely solely on the power of your leg muscles. Anyway, it was an extremely tough climb. I almost turned around at several points because it was ridiculously difficult. I kept going only because I can be pretty stubborn. I always want to get to the top before I turn around. Even so, when it started to rain heavily, I got off the bike and walked the bike the last two or three kilometers. My legs had given out completely.

The road was well-paved, but it was narrow and I had to constantly be on the lookout for vehicles coming up behind me. I was surprised to see some other cyclists out and about. The first I noticed was at the side of the road fixing a flat tire. I saw about fifteen or twenty cyclists in total, most of them racing down the mountain from the other direction. I assume they went up much earlier than I did to take advantage of the cooler morning hours and the reduction in traffic. They were all riding racing bikes and were outfitted in all high-tech cycling gear. Those bikes don’t have the low gear ratios of my mountain bike, and going up, they were up out of the seats like riders in the Tour de France – whipping the bike from side to side as they use their body weight to drive the pedals. I wish I could do that, but I can’t. It feels a bit silly to be sitting down the entire time all hunched over the handlebars, but that is all I can do.

It was extremely hot, of course, and I was drenched in sweat. Soaked through and through. It’s amazing how much I sweat. I didn’t see any of the other cyclists sweating at all, but they were all Filipinos and are accustomed to the climate.

The viewpoint Top was a major disappointment in the end. From what I’d read about it, it sounded like a popular tourist destination, and I was counting on sitting on a beautiful patio with a nice view over the city and the ocean while a waiter brings me an iced coffee. But there was nothing like that there. In fact, the Top Skyline Garden (its official name, I learned) is actually a cemetery. There is a dirt parking lot across the street. And then there is a strange little garden with high cement walls going out from the center like the spokes of a wheel. And the cement walls were covered in hundreds of squares – each square being the front of an above-ground burial site. (I can’t remember what you call those things.) The walls were relatively narrow, so they couldn’t hold a complete body stretched out. They must hold cremated remains. And that’s all there was there except for a bathroom. The view wasn’t even that impressive. In fact, the view over the countryside and hills on the other side was much nicer than the view over the city and ocean. The best thing about this place was the bathroom. That turned out to be a godsend because no sooner did I get off the bike and take out the camera to take a picture than I felt a savage pain in my stomach. This was not good, and I hobbled over to the bathroom bent over with the pain. As fast as I could, I locked up my bike and took off the pannier bag and went inside the bathroom. Just in time! Explosive diarrhea – as always. That is such a pain. It’s exhausting, too, and turns into a big, sweaty, tiring ordeal as you try to move around in the confined spaces of a bathroom and keep your clothes off the dirty floor and keep your ankles from being devoured by mosquitoes. I finished up and got out and reassembled my bike and rolled it back out toward the viewpoint. But as soon as I got there, I found myself laid low by another searing pain in my gut. Guess I had left the bathroom too soon. I stayed out there as long as I could to give whatever nastiness was in my digestive system time to move along the tract as far as possible. Then at the last possible moment, I hobbled back to the bathroom and went in for round two. I often wonder how nice it must be to be able to go out into the world without worrying about bathrooms and sudden stomach attacks. I have to consider it all the time.

There was another amusing incident on this trip. The incident begins two days ago when I found a three-inch rip in the back left shoulder of my shirt. I had no memory of hooking it on a nail or a sharp edge or anything. So where that rip came from was a big mystery. I wanted to sew it up so it didn’t spread, but I only had black thread. So I went to a department store to buy more thread. They had a sewing department, and, as always happens, they had every color in the universe except the one color I needed. This always happens to me. My shirt is a kind of grey. So I wanted grey thread. This place had hundreds of different threads. They had every color and color range you can imagine from bright red to dark purple to white to green to blue to yellow and on and on. They had every single color except for grey. They did have white and they did have black, but no one thought to mix these two and come up with grey. The closest I could get was a kind of brown, and I bought a small spool of that. I settled into my room later that day and had a cup of coffee and listened to podcasts while I sewed up my shirt. It wasn’t a professional job by any means, and the tear was not hidden in any way. You could see this Frankenstein scar of brown thread holding together a big section of bunched-up material. But I’m not entering fashion contests on a daily basis here. It was time to wash some clothes, and I washed my two shirts along with a pair of underwear. I hung them to dry, and I put on that shirt with the sewed up patch when I went out this morning.

Flash cut to the Top lookout point. After my two trips to the bathroom (a bathroom I was VERY thankful to have access to), I got ready to ride my bike down the mountain and back to Cebu. I figured I might as well take advantage of the water tap in the bathroom to soak my shirt and rinse all the sweat out. I put it under the tap and gave it a good soaking. I squeezed it out two or three times and then soaked it again to get it as clean as possible. The idea was to put it on soaking wet to be as cool as possible. It would dry in just a few minutes, so being so wet was not a problem. Anyway, I picked up the wet shirt and flipped it around so that I could put my left arm through the sleeve. That went well and then I tried to get my right arm through the other sleeve. I had trouble locating the sleeve hole for just a second, and I ended up punching my entire hand and arm right through the shirt! I literally punched a big hole threw my shirt. No wonder I had gotten a three-inch tear in the shirt the other day. The material was as weak as tissue paper. The slightest touch of anything and it just tore like paper. It was crazy.

It’s true that I’ve worn this shirt a lot and it has been out in a brutal tropical sun for hundreds of hours. Still, it was a very expensive shirt, and it should have lasted longer than this. Of course, it wasn’t a Columbia Sportswear shirt or a North Face shirt. Those would still be going strong. No, this was the Taiwanese version of those shirts. The North Face clothing in Taiwan was ridiculously expensive – up to four times as much as it would cost in Canada. They slap on massive import duties on that sort of thing to protect their own industries. So I bought the Taiwanese version. These shirts were supposedly made of the same high-tech material – the quick dry stuff that is supposed to be cool and lightweight and extremely strong. Well, I’ve had nothing but trouble with these stupid shirts. They cost a fortune relative to normal shirts and almost immediately, the buttons started popping off. That annoyed me. They also faded very fast. I noticed that whenever I washed them, the wash water would be dark grey as the dye would leach out of the material. And now it’s clear that they can’t stand up to tropical sunlight either and simply lose all strength. It was so silly to be standing there with my arm sticking out of a hole in the back of my shirt. The really funny part is that a local maintenance guy and security guard had taken an interest in me and my bike. They seemed to be quite curious about what I could be doing in the bathroom for those long, long, long stretches of time. I think he suspected the worst because when I came out of the bathroom the second time, this guy was standing there with a mop waiting for me. I guess he figured that the way I went in there all bent over and clutching my stomach, there would be some cleaning to do.

Anyway, he was also standing there when I took off my shirt and went into the bathroom to soak it in water. He, like most Filipinos, was fascinated with all the hair on my chest. They are a rather hairless people and to them I look like a half-human grizzly bear. He was clearly puzzled as to why I was soaking my shirt, and I tried to explain that it was to keep my body cool and that the shirt was made of a special material that dries out very quickly. I’m telling him about the wonders of this new space-age material, and while I’m doing so, I try to put on this technological marvel, and I punch a hole through the back with my arm. He probably thought I was doing this on purpose, too, to create air vents for more cooling. I got a lot of strange looks on my way down the mountain. I stopped at a couple of places to fill up my water bottle (I’d only brought one), and people’s eyes were staring at my bare shoulder sticking through my shirt. Was this a fashion choice, or was I one of the rare dirt-poor foreigners that can’t afford proper clothing?

And that’s about it for today’s adventure. It was nice, as I said, to get out of the worst part of the city and up into the mountains. Filipinos are not so jaded up there. In this downtown area, they see lots of retirement-age foreign men – white-haired grandpas walking around with twenty-year-old hookers on their arms – so it’s no surprise that they are less than enthusiastic when one of us walks into the 7-11 to buy a cup of coffee. I do not make it a habit to adorn myself with young hookers, but they don’t know that and they assume I’m just one of the horny old men constantly filling his pockets with bargain-basement viagra from the street. But up in the mountains, people are not accustomed to seeing Westerners – particularly Westerners on a bicycle. So people were friendly and jovial. It was a nice change.

I was surprised, though, at the ritzy neighborhoods I went through on my way. As in most cities, the cool and pleasant highlands are populated with the rich, and there were a surprising number of BMW dealerships and very fancy restaurants and hotels. It felt weird to start the day with the boys sleeping on the sidewalks in big piles and end it with the lifestyles of the rich and famous. That’s a sign of what I keep talking about – how the Philippines is not that poor a country. There is money and infrastructure here. It’s just poorly organized, so there are cracks in society and you can end up with so many dirt-poor people sleeping on the sidewalks while so many others spend their time at spas discussing which new BMW to buy. It doesn’t seem right.

Something very fast just scurried out from under my bed and disappeared under an old wardrobe in the corner. I’ve seen this creature out of the corner of my eye a few times, but I’m not completely sure of what it is. I thought at first that it was a mouse, but I’m not sure now. My experience of mice here is that they are brave little creatures and will come out in the open a lot. This thing I just saw stays hidden. It’s probably just one of the giant cockroaches, but it moved way too fast for that. And the cockroaches come out in the open, too. Perhaps it will remain a mystery.

5:00 p.m.

Lots of fun out there on the streets. While I was sitting inside this afternoon, I heard a couple of loud booms. I figured it was either thunder or construction in the building. And when I went outside to track down some early dinner, I realized it had been thunder. A storm had passed through and dumped enough water in a short time to flood the streets. There was about a foot of water out there going down the streets at the pace of a pretty strong river. This was enough water to fill all the streets from side to side and to go up the curb and cover all the sidewalks. Fortunately, it was not quite enough to get over the final ledges and into the businesses, so nobody had been flooded. And there was still power. People were taking it in their stride. Since it’s the tropics, people wear flip-flops or sandals or thin shoes, so everyone was just wading through the water. The rain was the bigger problem, and people were hiding under awnings and blocking the sidewalks. So walking around was a hundred times more difficult than normal, but I dealt with that by just wading through the deepest water in the street. The flood had kept traffic flow to a minimum, so there was lots of room on the streets themselves. Anyway, I had a basic Filipino meal – a meat dish, a vegetable dish, rice, and a slice of a big, thick omelette – kind of like a souffle, but made with egg and vegetables with a wheat crust. A pretty substantial meal. It came to 67 pesos, which is about $1.50. Not super super cheap but not expensive either. I had this meal at my favorite eatery – the Golden Crust.

This afternoon, I discovered that I was facing a bureaucratic bottleneck with my plans to leave the Philippines by boat. Actually, there are two bottlenecks. The first is just one of logistics. There is only one boat a week to Zamboanga. It leaves on a Monday – if it leaves at all. And there is also only one boat a week going from Zamboanga to Malaysian Borneo. It also leaves on a Monday. Finally, my visa expires precisely on a Monday. This means that I would have to take the first boat on that previous Monday to get to Zamboanga. And then I would have to spend an entire week in Zamboanga waiting for the boat to Malaysia. That isn’t a huge problem for me. I’m sure I could find a ton of interesting things to do in Zamboanga. However, the timing is pretty tight with my visa expiring on the same day the boat leaves. The boat often is delayed until the next day. If that happens, I would be screwed.

The other bottleneck is much more serious. It turns out that since I’ve been in the Philippines for so long, I have to get a special economic clearance permit to leave the country. This has to be presented to immigration at airports and at the docks. I’m not sure what the certificate is for. I think it has something to do with taxes. But it doesn’t matter. It is required and costs 500 pesos to get (plus three pictures) and it can only be gotten at immigration offices. Zamboanga doesn’t have an immigration office. I looked into getting this clearance certificate ahead of time in Cebu, but it’s not possible. They will only issue it within a week of your date of departure. Basically, that means that according to the established rules, I can’t leave from Zamboanga. It’s possible that once in Zamboanga, I’d be able to find a way around this problem. Perhaps officials can be bribed or they will ignore the requirement. My sense, though, is that this is not the case. In Cambodia, sure. But not in the Philippines. They love regulations and fees and they enforce them regardless of the consequences. If there is a policy or a rule, they enforce them. There isn’t a lot of flexibility that I can see.

Anyway, it looks like I’ll have to fly out of the country. I’m not particularly upset by that. The only reason I wanted to leave by boat originally was to avoid the hassle of having to box up the bike. But it looks like the hassle of leaving from Zamboanga is actually greater than the hassle of boxing up the bike. Anyway, I’m going to look into flights tomorrow. No idea where I will fly to, though. I’ll have to figure that out. I wasn’t married to the idea of going to Sulawesi. It just seemed convenient and interesting. But I don’t have to go there. So, where to next? I do want to visit Myanmar. That’s the one country I really do want to visit. Perhaps, since I’ve spent so much time in the Philippines, it would be better to spend my money and time in Myanmar – a place I haven’t seen – instead of in Indonesia – a place I’ve already visited. Of course, I’ve never cycled in Indonesia and I’ve seen only a small part of the country. I could easily go there this time and have a brand new experience.

Time to check the map.

Tags: bike, BMW, fly, Indonesia, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, visa